Tag: Managing Digital Learning

Practice

Published by: WCET | 8/6/2026

By Van L. Davis, Ph.D. As America marks its semiquincentennial, it’s leading me to reflect on its 1976 bicentennial. One of my enduring childhood memories is of the Freedom Train that traveled around the United States, carrying various historical documents, including George Washington’s personal copy of the Constitution, a replica of the Liberty Bell, and […]

Practice

Published by: WCET | 8/4/2026

By Betsy Piland When hackers took Canvas offline in May, institutions quickly learned that “too big to fail” was not a contingency plan. Cynthia Pascal, Northern Virginia Community College’s Associate Vice President of eLearning, detailed a scenario that will sound familiar to hundreds of institutions across higher ed: a ransomware attack that came at the […]

Practice

Published by: WCET | 7/2/2026

By Van L. Davis, Ph.D. Hi, I’m Van, and I’m an accidental technologist. (A what? I know. Just stick with me.)  The first time I encountered the internet, I was sitting at a terminal in Vanderbilt University’s computer science building, which still housed the mainframe. It was the early ’90s, and I used that terminal to log into the National Archives and pull up the text […]

Practice

Published by: WCET | 6/4/2026

It is not lost on me that the very thing that we often contingency plan around is now in need of its own contingency planning. Online learning, with the LMS at the center of it, is what we turn to in times of extreme disruption, whether that be a global pandemic, a wildfire, or an extreme weather event like a hurricane. What do we do when the LMS fails?

Practice

Published by: WCET | 4/8/2026

Institutional leaders are quickly realizing that “quality” isn’t an end-goal; instead, it’s an ongoing journey toward continued improvement. This idea, coupled with WCET’s commitment to supporting institutions as they face increasing pressure to innovate, is behind the launch of the new WCET Online Learning Quality Rubric Toolkit. The WCET Online Learning Quality Rubric Toolkit has […]

Practice

Published by: WCET | 4/2/2026

I came out of a graduate program that focused on research over teaching. I received one day of pedagogical training, which (because, as a historian, I was tapped to teach freshman composition) was half a day more than my peers. During my first few years of teaching, I floundered and struggled to find ways to […]

Practice

Published by: WCET | 2/26/2026

I’m currently testing out Copilot for WICHE as we work to refine our AI strategy and implementation. This morning, when I opened a new Word document to write this blog post, I was greeted with a helpful window prompting me to tell it what I wanted to write. Three minutes and one refinement to the […]

Policy

Published by: WCET | 2/12/2026

Professional licensure compliance often operates behind the scenes, but its influence on higher education has grown in recent years. It can shape which programs institutions offer, where students are able to enroll, and how institutions evaluate regulatory risk. The State Authorization Network’s (SAN) new report, Between the Lines, Behind the Work: Survey Findings on the […]

Practice

Published by: WCET | 2/3/2026

“Distance education isn’t as good as face-to-face.”“You have an online degree? That’s not really a degree.”“You went to an online school? Your degree must be a fake!”“Online schools aren’t as rigorous as ‘real’ colleges.” If you’ve been around digital learning since the late 1990s and early 2000s, you likely remember hearing disparaging comments like these. […]

Practice

Published by: WCET | 1/29/2026

Cutting through the noise to help institutions make smarter AI decisions As AI continues to reshape conversations across higher education, leaders are navigating an increasingly crowded landscape of competing claims, vendor promises, and institutional anxieties. In the midst of this information overload, misconceptions can cloud decision-making and slow meaningful progress. Through our national study of […]